Jonah Corven has spent the career you'd expect building the future and the nights you wouldn't expect trying to outrun what he helped set in motion. A background that spans machine learning research, safety evaluation, and the specific kind of institutional silence that settles over a company when the benchmarks stop meaning what everyone needs them to mean informs every page of this novel, though none of it can be sourced to a specific model card or internal review.
Jonah Corven is not the name on his badge. Born in Britain, he now lives on the Western Seaboard, a long way from the country that shaped his accent and a longer way still from the person he was before the work started. He shares a house with a dog who doesn't care about NDAs and a reading habit that leans heavily toward alignment papers and postmortem reports. He still goes to work every day. Draw your own conclusions about what that says.
